tuesday before the garden

"Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact."

-judith butler-

However, how often can we tighten our seams, hem up our edges?

Let's try, at least, to push up the sides of one another for now, 

swaddle and feather, tuck each other and both our feet in,

at least through the end of this winter, at least until an aura

of blues and pinks form around the empty branches of buds.

at least until this world all starts to smell of undoing, of being,

of loosening cracks, saps, and syrups. 

let's tighten our belts and backs until the honey starts to flow freely,

come april, june, or so.

The birds this all morning are all fat with winter, as it's 19 degrees.

you're all cold, right?

a voodoo priestess left me a chicken foot on the back of my bicycle.

this is alarming, as everything else yesterday was easy, even the 

batting down of brush and brambles in the woodland pasture,

even the directions printed and copied, even the sun, easy.

what, then does today offer me, 

if sunset collided with such hardness as that grizzled leg?

should i be nervous? or should i pick it up and wield it 

swiftly, with ease?

challenges met

we feasted through the week, and now we're finished.

i suppose some like to consider sunday the first, but

i rather enjoy lavishing it as the last, the hem of mid february.

potting soil was mixed and bagged, chestnuts baked and ground, 

valentine's day enjoyed with a small chocolate heart, sweet coffee,

some paper flowers and a meal of friends with straight backs.

some mortal fight left these blue feathers in the dead grass.

a week of losses, gains, triumphs, challenges, horses released

through gates 

by us

lassa's new

we constructed for lassa his own pen, now separate from the pregnant ewes,

now no longer able to ram the others away from sweet fermented grain.

he spent his first few hours pacing, tossing his horns about in a nervous fashion,

as you may twirl a pen cap in between your fingers, as you twist the paper napkin.

what does the animal need?

a tier in the hierarchy of shared space,

or isolated ownership of his own?

certainly not the wind or the blue tarp,

both which hung within the upper barn,

knocking and shoving at the calm.

we respect him and his hooves. we kneeled

to hammer in (i, crookedly, of course)

our gratitude and the nails of corrugated tin.

we spread hay, observed, watched not over,

but through, on eye level, the gates.

an outside lecture day

he made the distinction that birds appear to move through the cosmos,

as compared with moths, who move as part of and therefore with the cosmos.

the little king koennig told farmers in a lecture series that

insects are the elemental beings as seen through a looking glass. 

as alice, it resonates.

i observed a honey bee on the hem of my pants,

a woodpecker, stating his arguement against the solid nature of wood.

Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges

 Ursula, in a garden, found
 A bed of radishes.
 She kneeled upon the ground
 And gathered them,
 With flowers around,
 Blue, gold, pink, and green.

 She dressed in red and gold brocade
 And in the grass an offering made
 Of radishes and flowers.

 She said, "My dear,
 Upon your altars,
 I have placed
 The marguerite and coquelicot,
 And roses
 Frail as April snow;
 But here," she said,
 "Where none can see,
 I make an offering, in the grass,
 Of radishes and flowers."

-wallace stevens-